Work Text:
When Emma walks in to the loft David is pulling off his shirt that Neal has apparently just spit up on. Emma walks over to take Neal who is fussing at being set down for more than five seconds and pulls him into her arms. She smiles at her brother and bounces him slightly to settle his cries.
Emma catches movement out of the corner of her eye as David slips on another shirt and notices the small cursive print on his chest where Snow White is clearly written. She almost laughs aloud at the thought of Prince Charming getting a tattoo, or David Nolan for that matter.
“I didn’t take you for the tattoo type,” Emma says smiling.
David laughs and reaches to take back Neal. “Well it’s not as though I had a choice,” he says, adjusting Neal in his arms.
Emma’s heart thuds a little too violently in her chest. She clears her throat. “What do you mean?” she asks, thinking of the tattoo that lies across her own chest – in almost the same exact spot – for the first time in ages.
David smiles sadly at her and sits down on the couch, gesturing for her to do the same. “I guess it’s not the same in this realm, but in the Enchanted Forest it’s called the Mark of True Love. On the morning of their eighteenth birthday some people wake up with a name on their skin – I guess now that you mention it that it does rather resemble a tattoo. It’s the name of your soulmate –”
Emma’s head is pounding, her vision is tunneling around the edges and she can hear blood rushing through her ears. She balls her hands into fists as she fights the urge to vomit.
“Are you alright Emma?” David asks, placing what is surely meant to be a soothing hand on Emma’s shoulder – she flinches a mile.
“I’m fine,” she says, but David is still looking at her with concern, so she pushes down the urge to bolt and tries to smile encouragingly at him. “What were you saying?”
He gives her a look and she knows he doesn’t believe her, but he continues anyway for which she is grateful. “I was just saying that the mark comes on your 18th birthday and means you’re soulmates. It’s never wrong.” At what she can only assume is a look of outright panic on her face, David continues hurriedly, “don’t worry if you don’t have one, both soulmates never do. Only one of the pair has the mark, your mother doesn’t have it.”
Emma is fairly certain that she is going to either vomit on her father (just like Neal and isn’t that a weird image) or pass out if she can’t reign in her thoughts.
On the morning of her 18th birthday she’d woken to police entering the motel room that she and Neal had been crashing in. In a dazed panic she’d reached across the bed for Neal and found it cold. Since she was rather preoccupied by the police dragging her out of the motel and Neal’s glaring absence, she didn’t really have time to notice the name Killian Jones written in elegant script across her chest.
“Are you alright Emma?” Mary Margaret asks, coming in to the room. “You look pale.”
Mary Margaret walks over to Emma and places a hand gently on her forehead and frowns. Mary Margaret says something, but it’s as if she’s speaking in a dream and Emma cannot decipher the sounds coming out of her mouth and translate them into words.
She can only think of how long she spent blaming some asshole named Killian, because he had apparently somehow convinced her to get a tattoo when she must have been drunk off her ass because how else would she have no recollection of it in the morning? She blamed him – whoever he was – for knocking over the first domino that would send her life spiraling out of control.
Emma cannot pull her mind out of the past and that disastrous birthday morning but she’s trying desperately to focus on the present. Charming is telling a concerned Mary Margaret that he was telling Emma about the Mark of True Love, when Emma started to appear unwell. Emma knows that she has to speak now before they figure anything out, so she clears her throat and tries to force some sort of normalcy into her voice.
“You know,” she said forcing a smile – that is probably more of a grimace, “I am feeling a little hot. I’m going to go get some fresh air.”
Before she can even stand, Mary Margaret is stopping her with a light hand to her elbow. Mary Margaret’s gaze is far too knowing when she sits down next to Emma, squished between her and Charming on the small sofa. “You have a mark, don’t you Emma?”
Once she got out of jail Emma had decided that she’d spent enough time dwelling over the mysterious man who she blamed for ruining her life, andcompletely ignored the ink residing above her heart (it wasn’t that hard when the words were in such a looping elegant script that they were difficult to read – let alone upside-down or in a mirror).
Emma shakes her head no, but it doesn’t matter. Charming lets out a breath of understanding and shifts his hold on Neal. “What’s his name?” he asks with a mix of fatherly possessiveness and curiosity.
Emma’s heart seizes almost painfully in response, as if the organ knows it’s being discussed. She manages to mumble out something about needing air and leaps up, running out of the apartment before either of them can even try to stop her – finally giving in to the urge to run that’s been licking at her heels since Charming said the word soulmate.
She’d been putting the name out of her mind for so long that when she finally met someone named Killian Jones, she didn’t put two in two together until she was stuck at the top of a beanstalk with him. Her panic at finally finding the man whose name was branded on her made her abandon him at the top; because how in the world could she have a man’s name from the Enchanted Forest (Captain Hook no less) tattooed on her. So she did what she did best and ran, both physically and mentally.
The only difference now is that she knows that it wasn’t a drunken tattoo with Hook’s name on it, but the name of her true– she can’t even let the thought form without feeling the urge to sprint. Hook’s name is Killian – Captain fucking Hook’s name is Killian Jones. Emma couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t fucking breathe. She started to run away from the apartment, barely resisting the urge to press her hand against the mark.
Only once she starts heaving in breath and a stich forms in her side, does she stop running, so far out in the woods that it’ll take her at least an hour to walk back to civilization. Emma lets out a long slow breath through her nose, in an attempt to calm herself – though she wants more than anything to keep running until the woods are no longer familiar and she’s some place entirely new.
As soon as the thought forms Emma knows it is futile – her parents are here, her son is here, her soulmate is here. She lets out a low sigh and plops down onto a nearby fallen log. She can’t leave – not really, not without coming back and coming back would just be worse because it would involve a bunch of questions that she really doesn’t want to answer.
Just the thought of someone finding out what name is branded on her heart – that she has a name branded on her heart – has Emma almost hyperventilating. She tugs the collar of her sweater up higher, as if that can make the mark disappear. But what scares her more than the fact that fate apparently deigned her with a soulmate, is the small bubble of hope that’s growing somewhere deep within her chest.
She knows she can’t run away, not really, but she does hide out in the woods all day, and it’s around dusk when she realizes that they’ve probably sent out a search party. She still doesn’t move. She’s not ready to face what she’s learned, not yet.
Just as she’s contemplating returning to the loft, Killian finds her. And of course – of fucking course – he’s the one to find her. She still sitting on top of the fallen log she sat on over an hour ago and decided not to get up. He doesn’t say anything as he approaches her (she doesn’t want to be spoken to right now anyway, but the fact that he seems to know that just serves to make her angry).
When he’s only a step or two away he reaches out a hand to help her up and she recoils instinctively as though she’d been burned. He flinches in response and a wave of guilt crashes over her. Emma clears her throat and shifts over so there’s room for him, trying to tamp down the nerves swelling in her stomach that always accompany interactions with him (and snuff out the knowledge of why). She doesn’t want to feel nervous; she doesn’t want to feel guilt or hope. She wants to feel angry. She wants him to give her a reason to hate him, well maybe she doesn’t want that, but she wants a reason to be angry at least.
But of course, of course he talks about nothing – the position of the stars in the sky tonight, the lunar pull on the waves tomorrow, the waffles he had at Granny’s for breakfast. She doesn’t respond, but he speaks enough for the both of them, and in spite of herself she feels herself calming. The flames of hurt and anger (at herself, her parents, the universe who must get some great entertainment out her life) that she’d been trying to fuel – to hold on to – slip away with the cool evening breeze as though they’re nothing more than wisps of smoke.
He’s telling her about his trip with Henry sailing, and how he’d let Henry steer the ship all the way back in to port the other day when she finds herself blurting out, “do you believe in soulmates?” before her brain can catch up.
Her voice is hoarse from disuse and she clears her throat, uncomfortably aware that now that the words are out, she cannot take them back. He looks at her in mild surprise before schooling his features and looking back out into the forest. “Your parents mentioned something about that before they organized a search party for you love.”
Emma feels as though she’s on the precipice of something enormous. As if this moment is a deciding factor, the point at which the story can veer off in two very different directions. So rather than make a passive remark and ignore the words heavy over her heart – rather than let him leave her question unanswered – she pushes. “You didn’t answer my question.”
He rubs at the tattoo on his arm absentmindedly and she suddenly wonders if the name is echoed above his heart – if her mark is as screwed up as everything else in her life and that he is hers – but she isn’t his. He notices her stare and smiles sadly, dropping his wrist. He pulls the already low neckline of his shirt down. His chest is bare and she almost lets out a sigh of relief as that little flicker of hope grows without her permission to do so.
“I don’t know love. I think it’s more about choosing to love someone and to love them with everything you have,” and if he’s staring at her a little too intensely she pretends not to notice, “and not let ink upon skin forge a destiny.”
He shrugs at her. “But then when I see two who are matched together I start to question myself. So to answer your question in a way that absolutely does not answer your question, I don’t know if I believe.” He smiles at her a little crookedly.
Emma finds herself nodding because that’s quite possibly the exact same answer that’s floating around far less eloquently in her head. He doesn’t question her further – why she’s suddenly freaking out about soulmates and true love, and she can’t help but appreciate his silence on the matter.
So this time when he stands and offers her a hand up – she takes it. And for the brief moment when her hand is in his she can feel the warm tingle of magic dance up her arm, and smiles at him. A smile blooms on his face as well and there’s akin to adoration in his eyes. She finds herself lost in his gaze for a moment with their hands still clasped tightly together though they’re both standing firmly now. It’s the thought that she might not want to let go of his hand when it feels so warm and sturdy in hers that has her quickly dropping his hand and looking away with an almost shy smile.
Maybe the Mark of True Love isn’t so wrong after all.